Chapter XIX · FABRE’S WRITINGS

My study-table, the size of a pocket-handkerchief, occupied on the right by the inkstand—a penny bottle—and on the left by the open exercise-book, gives me just the room which I need to wield the pen. I love that little piece of furniture, one of the first acquisitions of my early married life. It is easily moved where you wish: in front of the window, when the sky is cloudy; into the discreet light of a corner, when the sun is tiresome. In winter it allows you to come close to the hearth, where a log is blazing.

Poor little walnut board, I have been faithful to you for half a century and more. Ink-stained, cut and scarred with the pen-knife, you know how to lend your support to my prose as you once did to my equations. This variation in employment leaves you indifferent; your patient back extends the same welcome to my formulæ of algebra and the formulæ of thought. I cannot boast this placidity; I find that the change has not increased my peace of mind: the hunt for ideas troubles the brain even more than does the hunt for the roots of an equation.

You would never recognise me, little friend, if you could give a glance at my grey mane. Where is the cheerful face of former days, bright with enthusiasm and hope? I have aged, I have aged. And you, what a falling off, since you came to me from the dealer’s, gleaming and polished and smelling so good with your beeswax! Like your master, you have wrinkles, often my work, I admit; for how many times, in my impatience, have I not dug my pen into you, when, after its dip in the muddy inkpot, the nib refused to write decently!

One of your corners is broken off; the boards are beginning to come loose. Inside you, I hear, from time to time, the plane of the Death-watch, who despoils old furniture. From year to year new galleries are excavated, endangering your solidity. The old ones show on the outside in the shape of tiny round holes. A stranger has seized upon the latter, excellent quarters, obtained without trouble. I see the impudent intruder run nimbly under my elbow and penetrate forthwith into the tunnel abandoned by the Death-watch. She is after game, this slender huntress, clad in black, busy collecting Wood-lice for her grubs. A whole nation is devouring you, you old table; I am writing on a swarm of insects! No support could be more appropriate to my entomological notes.

What will become of you when your master is gone? Will you be knocked down for a franc, when the family come to apportion my poor spoils? Will you be turned into a stand for the pitcher beside the kitchen-sink? Will you be the plank on which the cabbages are shredded? Or will my children, on the contrary, agree among themselves and say:

“Let us preserve the relic. It was where he toiled so hard to teach himself and make himself capable of teaching others; it was where he so long consumed his strength to find food for us when we were little. Let us keep the sacred plank.”

The little table protests to-day. It has no desire whatever to go up in smoke with the labour in which it has borne its part; it flatters itself, on the contrary, with the hope that having shared in the toil it may also have some chance of sharing the honour. Rather than this unjust sentence of death, it seems to hear a summons to life:

“Let us go back, O my table, to the days of our youth, the days of your French polish and my smiling illusions,” and it stands proudly upon its legs, as though to serve as a support for these pages destined to recapitulate Fabre’s written work, all that work which it has helped him to compose, from the first line to the last.

Of the first literary or scientific exercises of the youthful Fabre and the first quivers of the little table under the nervous, valiant, indefatigable pen of the young Carpentras schoolmaster, we shall say nothing, unless that there was really some excuse for trembling before the audacious and strenuous toil of the beginning, and all the exercise-books stuffed with figures and formulæ, diagrams and texts which represent the solitary and strictly personal work of preparation for two bachelor’s degrees, quickly followed by those of the licentiate and the doctor. It was an anatomical work, a memoir on the reproductive organs of the Myriapods, or Centipedes, that won for Fabre the degree of Doctor of Science.

Fabre’s first contribution to the Press was a memoir on the Predatory Hymenoptera, published in the Annales des sciences naturelles. This attracted great attention among the masters of science. The Institute of France awarded him a prize for experimental physiology. Darwin, then at the height of his fame, saluted him with amazed and rather uneasy admiration. Léon Dufour, the patriarch of entomology in those days, wrote the author a most eulogistic and encouraging letter; happy to have directed his researches toward discoveries which he himself had not suspected, the venerable scientist emphatically exhorted his young friend to continue his journey along the path that was opening before him, a path so full of promise.

Some time after this he published another entomological work which was by no means calculated to disappoint the hopes aroused by the first. It dealt with an insect related to the Cantharides, the Sitaris humeralis, and it contained matter no less unsuspected and no less astonishing than the first.

The impression produced was all the more profound in that the miracle of instinct was here accompanied by a physiological miracle, a phenomenon of metamorphosis wholly unknown, to describe which Fabre hit upon the very happy term hypermetamorphosis. To the ordinary series of transformations through which the insect passes in proceeding from the larval condition to that of the nymph and the perfect insect, this strange little beast adds another as a prelude to the first, so that the larva of the Sitaris passes through four different forms, known as the primary larva, the secondary larva, the pseudo-chrysalis, and the tertiary larva, and these resemble one another so little that only the most sustained attention on the observer’s part enables him to believe the testimony of his eyes.

All these revelations keenly stimulated the curiosity and emulation of the specialists, and set them “on the track of the history, hitherto mysterious, of the Cantharides and all the insects resembling them.… A number of naturalists, Beauregard, Riley, Valéry-Mayet, Künckel d’Herculais, Lichtenstein, and others began to study the insects more or less adapted to the preparation of blisters: the Mylabres, the Meloës, the Cantharides. Lichtenstein even carried the larvæ of the Cantharides in his watch pocket, enclosed in small glass tubes, so that he could keep them warm and observe them at any moment.”

These early essays were followed by many others, also published in the Annales des sciences naturelles, and were always received with the same favour by all the notable scientists of the time.

While he was soaring toward the heights, and making his way into unexplored regions, under the astounded gaze of the most eminent authorities, who saw themselves suddenly equalled and even surpassed, his scientific genius loved also to look downwards, to approach the beginners, to return, as it were, to the starting-point, in order to hold out his hand to them, and to trace out for them, through all the stages of science, the path that he had opened up for himself in the face of unheard-of difficulties.

He laboured to give them what he himself had felt the lack of almost as much as the help of masters: the assistance of luminous, living books, capable of teaching without fatigue and without tedium. His class books are, in fact, models of their kind. In them you will find no vague phraseology, but the simplest, most precise, yet most natural language; no idle excess of erudition, but the most perfect lucidity of text as of diagram; no dryness, nothing commonplace, but everywhere something picturesque, original, and full of life, giving charm and relief to all that is learned; and above all the constant care never to isolate oneself from life, to keep in touch with reality, by leading the youthful mind from the spectacles which are most familiar to it to the conceptions of science and from these to such of their applications as are most usual and most familiar.

To sum up, a rare talent for simply and clearly expounding the most difficult theories in such a way as to render them accessible to the youngest minds; a wonderful power of capturing the attention from all sides, of breaking down the water-tight partition which too often exists between the mind and the heart, between science and life, between theory and practice: such are the essential characteristics which earned Fabre the title of “the incomparable populariser.”

About 1866 and 1867, at the Normal College of Rodez, one of our professors used to read to us and teach us to admire certain little books by our as yet but little known compatriot, J. H. Fabre, who was born at Saint-Léons, so he told us, and had graduated from the Normal College of Avignon.

Fabre’s works of popularisation are very numerous: they include no less than seventy to eighty volumes; they embrace all the elements of the sciences learned and taught by the author: arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, mechanics, physics, chemistry, etc.; but their principal aim was to teach the natural sciences, which furnish the material of more than fifty volumes intended for the primary or secondary degree of education.

In his favourite domain of the natural sciences, as in that of the other sciences, the practical tendency of his teaching was by preference directed toward agricultural applications, as is shown by the very titles of many of his books: Eléments usuels des sciences physiques et naturelles, avec applications à l’hygiène et a l’agriculture—Le Livre des Champs—Les Auxiliaires—Les Ravageurs—Arithmétique agricole—Chimie agricole: indeed it was with the last volume that he inaugurated his series of initiatory textbooks. For the use of young girls and future housewives, he published books on Le Ménage, Hygiène and Economie domestique.

And all these little books are presented in a picturesque and attractive form. The very titles have nothing austere about them: Entretien de l’oncle Paul avec ses neveux sur les choses d’agriculture—Chimie de l’oncle Paul. There is also The Livre de Maître Paul, the Histoire des Bêtes, the Leçons des choses, the Livre d’Histoires and the Livre des Champs. Under different titles the other volumes evoke, like these, a sort of family atmosphere; they display the same concrete style of narrative and the same lifelike charm of dialogue.

Evidently Fabre was not one of these whose “life was strangled,” and his initiative stifled by the springes of University methods and the programmes beloved of the bureaucrats. On every side there was little but disdain for animals and plants; and it was these above all that he strove to popularise. When they are studied, it is only to dissect them or reduce them to abstract formulæ; but he considers them rather as they are in themselves and in their relations with human life. And while others speak of them as dead objects or as indifferent objects, to indifferent readers, Fabre speaks of them with sympathy and feeling, with the tenderness and geniality of an uncle speaking to his nephews, and he excels in communicating to his hearers the sacred fire which inspires him—the passionate love which he feels for all natural things.

It was Fabre’s fine independence that made him a pioneer. Certain of his manuals may no longer be sufficiently up to date, but his methods and his tendencies are precisely those that best respond to the needs and aspirations of the present time. For a wave of serious public opinion is revealing itself in favour of a renewal of our public education.

A time will come, let us hope, when the schools will be less artificial and removed from real life, and will no longer systematically ignore religion, the family, the country and the vocation of the pupils. When that time comes, the schoolmasters will turn again to the classic Fabre handbooks, or at all events to books modelled upon his, in order to teach the little peasant boys to love their fields, their beasts, their agricultural and pastoral labours; to teach them also sometimes to lift their heads from the furrows in order to look up at the returning stars.

Begun in 1862 by the publication of a book on agricultural chemistry, Fabre’s work of popularisation was continued until the appearance in 1879 of his first volume of the Souvenirs. It forms as it were a preface to the great entomological masterpiece. Thanks to the deserved success of the series, rather than to his wretched emoluments as professor, he achieved the security and independence necessary to the accomplishment of his mission. His class-books were the ransom that set him free. They enabled him to leave the town and escape into the fields. They even enabled him to realise his dream of a solitary corner of the earth and a life of leisure wholly dedicated to the patient and disinterested study of his beloved insects.

From another point of view this long and patient effort of scientific popularisation and intense literary production was not without its results as regard his later work. It enabled him to obtain a mastery of his medium, to exercise his faculty of expression and his mind, to vary and mature his observations, and finally to realise that tour de force of writing, for specialists, books that he who runs may read, and of performing the miracle of arousing the enthusiasm of men of letters for books that compel the admiration of scientists, and attracting the attention of the scientists to books that delight the man of letters.

The brilliance, colour, and vitality which enhance without ever diminishing the high scientific value of his Souvenirs are due, no doubt, to his native qualities, to the limpid and harmonious Gallic genius of which he affords so admirable a type; he owes them also, as we have said, to all those tiny lives, so vibrant with diligence, and so picturesque, whose lights and shades and naïve emotions seem to have found their way into his own heart, into his style; but he owes them still more to his young friends, the primary school-children, to the pains which he took, the ingenuity which he expended in bringing within the grasp of the child’s mind, in impressing upon his imagination and sensibility as well as his understanding, the creatures and the doings of the living world.

As we have recorded, it was only in 1879 that Fabre inaugurated his great and immortal collection of Souvenirs entomologiques.

From this same year dates the acquisition, so greatly desired, of the open-air laboratory and his installation in the cherished solitude of Sérignan, where he was able to give free play to his entomological tastes, and to continue to add to the Souvenirs.

Henri Fabre was then fifty-five years of age, and apparently broken by fatigue and suffering. This did not prevent him from undertaking and accomplishing a task in which we know not which to admire the most: the acuteness of observation or the vigour of thought, the enthusiasm of the investigator or the animation of the writer. Here is a wonderful example to all those whom advancing age and life have already cruelly bruised; to all those who might be tempted to give up or to flinch under the burden of grief or disappointment, instead of listening to the voice of their talents, the appeal of their friends, the summons of God Himself to generous and devoted action, and to the great harvest of souls and ideas.

For forty years [says Fabre] I have struggled with unshakable courage against the sordid miseries of life; and the corner of earth I have dreamed of has come at last.

In the touching, desolate accents of these lives we may, no doubt, hear the echoes of a whole lifetime of toil and trial; but above all they express the cruel grief which had just wrung the kindly, tender heart of the great scientist. He was still suffering from the blow dealt him by the death of his beloved son Jules at the moment of writing these lines on the first page of the second volume of the Souvenirs, piously dedicated to the memory of the lost child.

From the very beginning of his great entomological work Fabre sought to free himself from another reproach, which wounded him to the quick, because it struck at his fidelity to his chosen study, and, what is more, to scientific truth:

Others again have reproached me with my style, which has not the solemnity, nay, better, the dryness of the schools. They fear lest a page that is read without fatigue should not always be the expression of the truth. Were I to take their word for it, we are profound only on condition of being obscure. Come here, one and all of you—you, the sting-bearers, and you, the wing-cased armour-clads—take up my defence and bear witness in my favour. Tell of the intimate terms on which I live with you, of the patience with which I observe you, of the care with which I record your actions. Your evidence is unanimous: yes, my pages, though they bristle not with hollow formulæ nor learned smatterings, are the exact narrative of facts observed, neither more nor less; and whoso cares to question you in his turn will obtain the same replies.

And then, my dear insects, if you cannot convince those good people, because you do not carry the weight of tedium, I, in my turn, will say to them:

Our author’s strong personality is revealed no less in the bulk of his work than in this declaration of principles which might serve as a prologue to the latter.

To study living entomology, that is, to study the insect living its life and in the highest manifestations of its life, in its instincts and its habits, in its aptitudes and its passions, in a word, in its psychic faculties; to replace the dominant standpoint of morphology and physiology by the standpoint of biology and psychology; such is the essential programme of the writer of the Souvenirs.

And to tell the whole story in a few words, the essential object, the general impulse of this curious and powerful mind, which refuses to divide science from philosophy, is to consider the insect, how it lives; to note its actions and its movements; to reach its inner from its outer life; its inward impulse from its external action; and then to climb upwards from the insect to man and from man to God.

“See first; you can argue afterwards.” “The precise facts are alone worthy of science. They cast premature theories into oblivion.”

He always makes direct for the facts as Nature presents them. The books fail him or are not to his liking. Most of them dissect the insect; he wants it alive and acting. The best contain but the shadow of life; he prefers life itself. If he happens to quote them, it is usually to deplore their deficiencies or to correct their errors, or perhaps to do homage to a precursor or a rival, but not to borrow from them the history of an insect.

This history he wishes to take from life, and he refuses to write except according to Nature and the data provided by the living subject. His narratives are always the result of strictly conscientious and objective inquiries: he records nothing that he has not seen, and if he has sometimes heightened his pictures by somewhat vivid hues, he has only given his style the relief and the colour of his subject. The danger of such scientific records when they are written by a man of letters and a poet like Fabre into the bargain is that there is a danger of their being written with more art than exactitude. And it is apparently this that causes so many scientists to distrust science that also claims to be literature. Fabre was not always immune from this species of discredit which the writer may so easily cast upon the scientist. But this unjust accusation was long ago withdrawn, and to-day all are agreed as to the absolute truthfulness of his portraits and his records. He has talent and imagination, it is true, but he has applied his talent to the sincere investigation of the facts, and his imagination only to achieve the more complete and faithful expression of the reality. A great thinker once uttered this profound saying: “Things are perceived in their truth only when they are perceived in their poetry.” This saying might serve as a motto for the whole of Fabre’s entomological work.

To collect the data which he requires for the foundation of his philosophical structures, Fabre is not content with observing the insect as it lives and labours when left to itself, writing down, so to speak, at its dictation the data which it deigns to give him as it would give them to any one who possessed the same patience and the same gift for observation. After these first overtures, he seeks more confidential information; to obtain this he inverts the parts played by observer and insect; from being passive he becomes active; he provokes and interrogates, and by different experiments, often of wonderful ingenuity, he enables and even compels the insect to confide to him what it would never have divulged in the normal course of its life and occupations. Fabre is the first to think of introducing this kind of artificial observation, which he calls experiment, into the study of the animal “soul.”

It is a great, silent, isolated room, brilliantly lighted by two windows facing south, upon the garden, one of which at least is always open that the insects may come and go at liberty.… The middle of the room is entirely occupied by a great table of walnut-wood, on which are arranged bottles, test-tubes, and old sardine boxes, which Fabre employs in order to watch the evolution of a thousand nameless or doubtful eggs, to observe the labours of their larvæ, the creation and hatching of cocoons, and the little miracles of metamorphosis, after a germination more wonderful than that of the acorn which makes the oak.

Fabre reveals a consummate skill in this difficult and delicate art of experimentation and inducing the insect to speak. The smallest incident, insignificant to a mind less alert than his, suggests further questions or gives rise to sudden intuitions and preconceived ideas which are immediately subjected to the test of experiment. But it is not enough to question the insect; one must understand its replies; it is not enough to collect or even to provoke data. One must know how to interpret them.

The most interesting, instructive, and delightful course of training: his books are this, not only in virtue of the writer’s method and point of view, but in virtue of his language. For the living scenes of the Souvenirs, as well as the interpretations interspersed between them, are expressed in words so simple and so well chosen that they are realised without effort and in the most striking relief in the reader’s mind and imagination.

Fabre hates to see science make use of pedantic and pseudo-scholastic terminology. Apart from the fact that it may repel the reader, all this idle apparatus of obscurity serves only too often to mask error or vagueness of thought.

By seasoning the matter with indigestible terms, useful for dissimulating vagueness of thought, one might represent the Cione as a superb example of the change brought about by the centuries in the habits of an insect. It would be very scientific, but would it be very clear? I doubt it. When my eyes fall upon a page bristling with barbarous locutions, supposedly scientific, I say to myself: “Take care! The author does not properly understand what he is saying, or he would have found, in the vocabulary which so many clever minds have hammered out, some means of clearly stating his thought.”

Boileau, who is denied the poetic afflatus, but who certainly possessed common sense, and plenty of it, informs us:

“Ce que l’on conçoit bien s’énonce clairement.”

(That which is clearly grasped is plainly said.)

“Just so, Nicolas! Yes, clearness, always clearness. He calls a cat a cat. Let us do the same: let us call gibberish a most learned prose, to afford a pretext for repeating Voltaire’s witty remark: ‘When the listener does not understand and the speaker himself does not know what he is saying, that is metaphysics.’ Let us add: ‘And abstruse science.’ ”

The magic of words! He has done more than discover it in the pages of other writers. He has illustrated it on every page of his own writings, adapting it so exactly to the magic of things that it delights the scientist as Nature herself would, and enchants the poet and the man of letters as only the masterpieces of art and literature have power to do.